Birth of a new nation

Published on Saturday 25 March 2006 01:58

SEVEN hundred years ago today, Robert Bruce was coronated at Scone, the ancient inauguration place of the kings of Scots in the presence of four bishops, five earls and 'the people of the land'.

Yet this was no celebration in which the nation at large could rejoice. The central figure, Robert Bruce, was an excommunicant, damned to eternity for having blasphemously defiled the sanctuary of the church by killing his rival, John the Red Comyn, at the altar of Greyfriars in Dumfries. Furthermore, a majority of Scots believed Scotland already had a king, their exiled head of state. King John Balliol had been judged, in 1292, to have the best claim to the kingship by Edward I of England, who dismissed the bid by Bruce's 80-year-old grandfather.

For three years, the English master attempted to manipulate the puppet-monarch, who valiantly strove to cut the strings before he was ultimately forced into ignominious surrender, stripped of power, honour, and respect. Edward had then proceeded to conquer Scotland, placing English garrisons in almost all the major castles.

The inspirational flame of resistance kindled by William Wallace was now no more, the hero brutally executed and his nation subjected to the second English conquest in a decade. Edward was growing old but he was still arguably the most powerful ruler in medieval Europe.

Comyn's murder provoked civil war with his family and supporters, not to mention powerful allies; John Balliol was his uncle. As a chronicler observed, Bruce was engaged upon a undertaking supported by very few, "who in comparison with the multitude of the other side were like a drop of water reckoned against the waves of the sea, or a single grain of seed against a great number of grains of sand".

IT IS TRULY remarkable that individuals of the stature and accomplishment of Wallace and Bruce should have appeared in the same generation but over the centuries, Scots have been readier to accept Wallace as the country's unimpeachable hero, the single-minded warrior who refused any compromise. His countrymen have shown little willingness to warm to Bruce the aristocrat, the apparent vacillator who seemed all too willing to find some accommodation with the enemy. Such attitudes fail to comprehend the complexity of the man and his responsibilities, above all to his family. Bruce was a prisoner of his past in a way that Wallace was not.

He was born 11 July, 1274, probably at Turnberry, the seventh Robert Bruce in a direct line of descent from the first Robert, granted the lordship of Annandale by David I in 1124. There is a story that Bruce's mother, the Countess of Carrick, a widow, essentially abducted her future husband, the first of a series of "gutsy ladies" that Bruce encountered in the course of his life.

Bruce grew up a Gaelic speaker in Carrick while remaining mindful of his Annandale interests. Large though the Bruce landholdings were in Scotland, they never came near in extent to those in England. The Bruces were part of an Anglo-Scottish aristocracy to whom frontiers meant little. His grandfather was buried at the family foundation, Guisborough Priory in Yorkshire, but the future king was emphatically a Scot. Indeed, as has often been observed, he was more of a Scot than Edward was an Englishman, and one whose greatest contribution was eventually to confer a political sense of Scottish identity upon his people.

Little is known of Robert's early life. In 1292, his father resigned the earldom of Carrick to him and when Balliol became king, the Bruces refused his lordship and ignored the summons to military service. As a consequence, Annandale was granted to the Comyn Earl of Buchan. The Bruces were not regarded as model Scottish subjects and when John Comyn initiated the first hostile military action of the Wars of Independence, he targeted Carlisle Castle, held on behalf of Edward I by Bruce father and son.

Robert's grandfather and father both exhibited an element of pragmatism, some might say opportunism. Early in the English campaign of conquest, the father requested that he be given the throne, to which Edward famously retorted: "Have we nothing else to do but win kingdoms for you?" Both accepted Edward's overlordship, but whether they fell into the category of those magnates whose hearts were far from the English king, however close their persons might be, is uncertain. Their main priority was the wellbeing of the House of Bruce.

However, Robert Bruce surprisingly declared for the "patriot cause" in the spring of 1297, as Wallace began to stir. He was motivated because he was a Scotsman. "No man holds his own flesh and blood in hatred and I am no exception," said he. "I must join my own people and the nation in which I was born."

This may have been a ploy in which his father conspired, to ensure Bruce holdings remained intact whatever the outcome, but it can also be interpreted as arising out of genuine conviction. Bruce was a member of an emerging west of Scotland faction including Wallace, the Stewarts and Bishop Robert Wishart of Glasgow. Wishart, a tireless champion of Scottish rights and liberties for almost 20 years, was the man who told the Scots that warring against Edward was the equivalent of fighting against the Saracens in the Holy Land, that Independence was a crusade.

In 1298, Bruce and John Comyn became joint Guardians of Scotland in succession to Wallace, somewhat discredited by his defeat at Falkirk. The notion of "Guardian" is an interesting one that developed out of the phenomenon of the kingless kingdom. When Alexander III was accidentally killed in 1286, he left no heirs. A parliament at Scone appointed six Guardians to rule in his stead - two earls, two magnates (each with a Comyn representative) and two bishops, one of them Wishart.

When the Scots became aware that John Balliol had overstepped the mark in 1295 by refusing Edward military aid, he was set on one side and 12 Guardians replaced him. This was not, however, an outright deposition but a contrivance designed to negate his impending unseating by Edward I.

What transpired was a constitutional revolution, because a separation of the powers took place. Balliol retained the dignity of office while powers of administration were conferred upon the Guardians. Thus it was that Wallace, and indeed Bruce, though it must have pained him greatly, stated in official documents that they acted "in the name of the eminent prince Lord John, by grace of God the illustrious king of Scotland, with the agreement of the community of the realm".

A Guardian council held at Peebles in 1299 was disrupted when two knights drew daggers on one another, and before long Comyn leapt at Bruce, seizing him by the throat. A Comyn supporter claimed that nothing less than treason and lese-majesty were being plotted, remarks of particular interest in view of what was to happen at Dumfries seven years later. Soon after, Bruce resigned his position.

HIS MOVEMENTS AND motives are rather difficult to chart during the next five years. Wallace had conducted an embassy to France and the papacy aimed at securing the return of Balliol as King of Scots. Consequently, Bruce's enthusiasm for the cause apparently waned and he gravitated towards Edward's camp. This was unfortunate timing, as the English king vowed to lay waste the whole of Scotland, forcing her people into submission. Around the turn of 1301-2, Bruce jumped the fence. His position was unenviable, trapped between the forces of family loyalty, his obligation to preserve Bruce estates, noble rivalry and the preservation of face, honour and dignity while confronted with an apparently invincible English king.

Edward sweetened the pill by allowing Robert to marry, as his second wife, Elizabeth de Burgh, daughter of the Earl of Ulster. Yet it is difficult to accept just how comprehensively Bruce became Edward's man in a comparatively short time. He campaigned against the Scots and was made sheriff of Ayr and Lanark. He was part of a force which attempted to capture Wallace in February of 1304; later the same year he contributed to the fall of Stirling Castle to the English.

WHAT SEEMS TO have galvanised Bruce was the death of his father in April 1304, for he could now act alone. Less than two months later he made a pact with Bishop Lamberton, promising "to be of one another's counsel in all their business and affairs at all times and against whichever individuals". On the very same day and on the same terms, Bruce and the Red Comyn agreed a contract of mutual support. Comyn was the last to enter Edward's peace in 1304, the man most widely recognised as the true leader of the Scottish political community. Given his own track record, not to mention the rather uninspiring career of his opponent, Comyn must have been astounded to discover that Bruce regarded himself as a candidate for the kingship, but it also seems probable that he nurtured schemes of his own.

The chroniclers have tales about how Bruce approached Comyn with his plans "to finish the endless tormenting of the people" and of how the two men made some kind of deal about compensating the other if one was to be successful in attaining the prize. Comyn's response would have been that Bruce was not only guilty of treason (as he probably was himself) but worse, that he was a usurper, because by making his bid he was setting aside the very man that Comyn regarded as the legitimate king of Scots, his own relative King John.

Both men were due to attend court in Dumfries on 10 February, 1306, the one as Lord of Annandale, the other as keeper of Dalswinton Castle. It is pretty obvious that if Bruce were to be successful he had to find some way of buying off or neutralising Comyn. The fact that they met in a church suggests that because of previous antipathy neither trusted himself to trust the other, or his own actions.

All the indications are that Bruce struck first, at the very least severely wounding Comyn. Even Bruce's greatest admirer, the poet John Barbour, states that he acted wrongly because he did not respect the sanctuary; it was due to that pernicious deed that such misfortune later befell Bruce. The suggestion that Bruce only knifed Comyn, leaving others to finish him off, has been seen as a plea for exoneration. Bishop Wishart's pardon for Bruce's action a month later was outrageous and unlawful. Looking at the evidence overall, and considering the deportment of the two main protagonists, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that John the Red Comyn has suffered, at the hands of posterity, one of the greatest betrayals in all of Scottish history. As for Bruce, as Lord Hailes long ago shrewdly noted, his alternatives were to be a fugitive or a king.

Bruce took impressively swift action to capture a number of castles from Dumfries to Ayr, as well as Dunaverty in Kintyre while making a bid for Dumbarton. Some forward planning can be assumed. At Glasgow, Wishart produced robes and banners for the coronation before he and Bruce moved on to Scone. Lamberton showed up from Berwick to perform high mass. Those in attendance knew full well that they defied both God and Edward Plantagenet. Countess Isabel beguiled her Comyn husband, slipping away to Scone on his warhorse. It was her task to place the new king on the inauguration seat, the Stone of Destiny, which Edward had removed to Westminster in 1296. We know not what was used instead but the ceremony was clearly not dependent on the symbols; 25 March was not only Lady Day, it also marked the beginning of the civil year. In deliberately selecting the date, Bruce and his supporters were signalling the dawn of a new era. Scotland and the Scots would never be the same again.

• Ted Cowan is professor of Scottish History at the University of Glasgow and director of Glasgow's Crichton campus at Dumfries. He is the author of For Freedom Alone: The Declaration of Arbroath, 1320 (Tuckwell Press).